1995 Rape Numbers Lowest Since '89

Offenders In Jail Longer, Study Says

February 3, 1997|By FOX BUTTERFIELD The New York Times

The number of rapes reported to the police nationwide in 1995 dropped to 97,000, the lowest number since 1989 and the lowest rate per capita in a decade, according to a major report released by the Justice Department on Sunday.

The report also said that in a separate national survey of crime victims, designed to include people who did not report incidents to the police, the number of people 12 and older who were victims of rape or sexual assault fell by 44 percent from 1993 to 1995.

In addition, the report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that rape victims are disproportionately young girls, and that the length of time sex offenders serve in prison has been increasing.

President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno hailed the reported decline in rapes, but criminologists, academic experts on rape and leaders of women's groups divided sharply over whether the new figures were accurate and whether they should be seen as part of a broader trend toward an ebbing of violent crime.

"The Justice Department looks at incidence of rape, year by year, but many mental health experts believe it is common sense to look at prevalence, over a lifetime," said Mary Koss, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

Koss, who has been a critic of Justice Department statistics on rape in the past, said that "it may well be true that some types of rape are decreasing" - those in which the victims are in the 16to 24-year-old age bracket. "But that would not be a genuine decrease," she said, because with the aging of the Baby Boom population, there are fewer people age 16 to 24.

"That doesn't mean rape is happening less," Koss said, "just that there are fewer people for it to happen to."

The new Justice Department report did find evidence that increasing public awareness about rape and tougher attitudes toward sex crimes are resulting in longer prison time for sex offenders. The report said that although the average sentence for rape has remained stable over the last decade, at 10 years, the time served by rapists has increased 39 percent, to almost five years in 1993 from 3 1/2 years in 1985.

The new report, which was written by Lawrence Greenfeld, a senior statistician in the Bureau of Justice Statistics, also provides data supporting one of the key findings of recent academic research on rape, that the victims are disproportionately children and adolescent girls. Drawing on a new, more carefully prepared set of crime data reported to the police in three test states - Alabama, North Dakota and South Carolina - the study found that almost half of all rape victims are under 18.